The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
During the printing process, printers deposit toner or other print substance onto pages. Maintaining an accurate account of the print substance remaining in a toner cartridge, or other container, allows the printer to be effectively and efficiently maintained. Replacing a print cartridge too soon wastes toner. Failure to replace a print cartridge once it runs low puts the printer out of service, or potentially causes the printer to produce low-quality print jobs.
Conventional techniques typically estimate toner usage from the values of the pixel bits for the image to be printed. For example, the pixels for each line may be added together to obtain an estimate for the total amount of toner used for each line. The estimates for each line are added together to determine a total estimate for each page. A running total of the toner remaining in a toner cartridge is kept over the life of the toner cartridge. In some printer technologies—notably in laser printers—neighboring pixels influence the amount of toner deposited on a page at a particular location defined by a pixel. Thus, some conventional techniques use a linear function to estimate the impact of horizontally adjacent pixels when estimating an amount of toner deposited at a particular location.